Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Anna Parkina in the project space. Born in Moscow in 1979, Parkina’s work encompasses a variety of media, including collage, sculpture, and performance. In both her works in two and three dimensions, Parkina configures space as a subjective site simultaneously merging images and forms into a composite region. As Kim West writes in the catalogue for 2009 Venice Biennale, where Parkina’s work was included in the Italian Pavilion, the work achieves “striking visual effects by folding shapes and buildings, patterns and objects, silhouettes and contours into and out of one another, creating a layered, equivocal surface that may call to mind the impossible constructions and perspectives of Escher or perhaps even the treacherous images of Magritte.”

For the new body of work on view, entitled “Nests,” Parkina combines collage, watercolor and lithography. Her works are often rooted in the language of Soviet era montage and as such seek to overlap space “both mental and physical” in such a way as to create new and charged landscapes.  Works like “Pendulum on the fourth floor“ in which Parkina superimposes fragments of her face over an image of that most ominous of Soviet Era icons, the super apartment block, exemplify this phenomenon.  As Parkina herself says, the viewer may “recognize shapes and details which are totally independent, but [at] the same time it is impossible to separate one detail from the rest as there is almost organic fusion inside of the picture.“

Anna Parkina was born in 1979 and lives and works in Moscow. She studied at the Art Center College of Design in California and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including both the Venice Biennale and the Moscow Biennale in 2009. She also runs Tramway, a publishing house which produces artist’s books and magazines.